Top of page
Posted by: Tim St. Onge
Fascinating maps at various scales tell the story of the Battle of Forts Jackson and St. Philip, a pivotal moment in the Civil War and the contested fight for control of New Orleans and the Mississippi River.
Posted in: 19th century cartography, American History, Military History
Posted by: Tim St. Onge
The Panoramic Maps Collection, one of our most popular collections, features more than a thousand beautifully illustrated “bird’s-eye-view” maps of towns and cities across the United States, Canada, and even some internationally. To celebrate this collection, we are excited to launch View from Above: Exploring the Panoramic Map Collection, an interactive map that makes browsing …
Posted in: 19th century cartography, 20th century cartography, American History, City Histories, Geographic Information Science
Posted by: Tim St. Onge
Soon after the car came, inevitably, car traffic. Since the dawn of the automobile, the wide open road would become less and less wide open as private car ownership came to dominate the American transportation landscape in the early 20th century. While revolutionizing travel for many, the early decades of automobile use were fraught with …
Posted in: 20th century cartography, American History
Posted by: Tim St. Onge
There are some maps that, at first look (or second, or one-hundredth), seem to offer more questions than answers. It can surely be said that the map of nationalities in New York City, part of a series of maps from the Tenement House Committee of 1894, is one such curiosity. Looking closer at its historical …
Posted in: 19th century cartography, American History, City Histories
Posted by: Tim St. Onge
Los Angeles is world famous for its sunny beaches and Hollywood glamour, but did you know that the California metropolis has a long history as a booming oil city? At both large and small scales, maps help tell the stories of this often forgotten part of the Los Angeles’s past and present. The first commercially …
Posted in: City Histories
Posted by: Tim St. Onge
The latest Story Maps from the Library of Congress detail some of the fascinating adventures and technological innovations of early photography! Story Maps are immersive, interactive web applications that showcase the incredible stories of Library of Congress collections through text, images, multimedia, and interactive maps. You can find all Library of Congress Story Maps at …
Posted in: Geography and Map Division
Posted by: Tim St. Onge
The Library of Congress staff is excited to launch Story Maps, interactive and immersive web applications that tell the incredible stories of the Library’s collections! Story Maps, created within a Geographic Information Systems (GIS)-based software platform created by Esri, combine text, images, multimedia, and interactive maps to create engaging online narrative experiences. Under a program …
Posted in: Geography and Map Division, Manuscripts
Posted by: Tim St. Onge
Last month, the West African nation of Liberia marked 170 years of independence. The country has a unique and complex history, with a pivotal era of its founding as a colony captured in maps. The Geography and Map Division preserves a collection of twenty maps of Liberia produced in the mid-19th century, covering several decades …
Posted in: 19th century cartography, African History
Posted by: Tim St. Onge
This blog post is part of a summer series on imaginary maps, written by Hannah Stahl, a former Library Technician in the Geography & Map Division. Read the introductory post to the series here. During this summer we’ve entered the mindsets of readers from the Middle Ages, traveled with Frodo and Sam through Mordor, visited …